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School pride can take many forms. There's pride in the home team, pride in academic achievement, and certainly pride in your college or university's technological advancement.

With millions of higher-education students in the United States sporting laptops and smartphones, schools are in a constant state of catch-up to stay digitally relevant. And not just for students, but also staff, faculty, even parents and alumni. That's why we've once again partnered with staff members of The Princeton Review, who were accommodating enough to ask our tech-specific questions as part of a survey conducted earlier this year for the 2009 edition of its annual publication, The Best 368 Colleges.

What we found is a vastly different landscape from what it was in 2006, the year of our previous collaboration. Of our top 20 schools in 2006, only 8 made the list this year. Villanova University, the former number 1, dropped to 15th place. High-tech poster child MIT, the former number 2, dropped to 20. At the same time, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) went from number 6 to number 1; other climbers included Pomona College (5), Eckerd College (7), and Stanford University (9). Who went where in the lineup isn't as interesting as why, however, so let's dive into the results from our top 20 and see what makes for a truly high-tech campus.  next: Academics

Eric narrowly averted a career in food service when he began in tech publishing at Ziff-Davis over 20 years ago. He was on the founding staff of Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine (all defunct, and it's not his fault). He's the author of two novels, BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale"--Publishers' Weekly) and KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. He works from his home in Ithaca, NY.
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